The Part About Fate
This is a guide to 'The Part About Fate'. pg 235 "That's what I like to hear, son," said the boss. "Did you hear that Jimmy Lowell got whacked?" Natasha Wimmer: "Bolaño was a reader of Walter Mosley, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, Thomas Harris, and Chester Himes. His taste for pulp fiction was complemented by his taste for B-movies. The following are a few of the items that appear on a list he compiled of random subjects he enjoyed discussing with Fresan, a similarly avid consumer of pop culture: Philip K Dick, David Lynch (see note to p. 431(?)), Kubrick, serial killers, the sexual habits of red-backed squirrel monkeys and ants and great whales. (Also included on the list: Borges, Gombrowicz, Proust, Wittgenstein.)" pg. 244 Years ago he had published a book called ''Eating Ribs with Barry Seaman'' Natasha Wimmer: "One indication of many that Barry Seaman is modeled on Bobby Seale, founder with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers. In 1988, Seale published a barbeque cookbook titled Barbeque'n with Bobby. In the acknowledgments he thanks Jerry Rubin, 'who was really the first to enthusiastically suggest that I write a cookbook. While we were both political prisoners in 1969 during the Great Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial, I would go on and on, describing recipes detail by detail on how I would prepare my favorite dishes.'" pg. 280 "What about Robert Rodriguez?" "I like him," said Fate. "That shithead is one of ours," said Chucho Flores. Natasha Wimmer: "Robert Rodriguez: Mexican-American director who made his name with El Mariachi, filmed on a shoestring budget. Later frequently associated with Quentin Tarantino (From Dawn Till Dusk; Grindhouse). No movie like the video viewed in 2666 ''has been ascribed to him." '''pg 313' "This place is like hell," he said to Rosa Amalfitano. Natasha Wimmer: "Fate is referring to the Santa Teresa restaurant El Rey del Taco, one of the more overtly evil sites in 2666. Further on, an Argentinian journalist describes the 'heaviness of a petrified nightmare' that hangs over the tables. There is plenty of explicit horror in 2666, but it might almost be seen as a distraction from the presence of evil in everyday things and actions, as in the films of David Lynch. Bolaño writes about seeing the world through such a lens in an essay about the London images of photographer Gilles Larrain: 'Larrain photographs a queue: people waiting for the bus. This takes place in London but it might be said to happen on the fringes of hell. A perfectly orderly, perfectly normal queue... From this point of view, London Bridge, with its double-decker buses and its monstrous columns plunging into the dark, cold waters, takes on the guise of hell-bridge: a bridge along which the shadows of people slip and under which the water flows...with the majesty and sovereignty of death. I say monstrous, hell, shadows, majesty, death, but none of these words should be read with emphasis, but rather in a casual tone, as Larrain photographs them.'" pg 339 He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me. "It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film," said Fate. The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages. It is indeed the title of a David Lynch film, the 1992 film prequel to Twin Peaks.